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Northern Islands & Fermi Busted On Open-Source

05-25-2011, 03:10 PM

Phoronix: Northern Islands & Fermi Busted On Open-Source

Even with the likely release of the Linux 3.0 kernel, open-source graphics drivers continue to be a big problem for the Linux desktop. While they have improved a lot in recent years, for many Linux users they can cause horrific headaches. Recently it was mentioned on Phoronix that Intel Sandy Bridge is in bad shape for Ubuntu 11.04 and that it even broke upstream in Linux 2.6.39, but Intel's far from being the only driver experiencing a choppy boat ride...

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When testing out the Nouveau kernel tree for its brand new Fermi FUC microcode replacement, that too was bugged up. As of this morning, on the GeForce GTX 460 it's not working right and there's just lots of PRUNK140 messages being emitted. For better or worse, at least this Nouveau code isn't being primed until the Linux 2.6.41/3.1 release.

Duh? It was committed so people could test it and file bug reports, so that it can work on all the hardware it needs to support. It's not worth whining when something is broken by a commit to an unstable git repository. Just file a bug report so it can be fixed, instead of writing an article about it and uploading a YouTube video, which accomplished nothing.

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Duh? It was committed so people could test it and file bug reports, so that it can work on all the hardware it needs to support. It's not worth whining when something is broken by a commit to an unstable git repository. Just file a bug report so it can be fixed, instead of writing an article about it and uploading a YouTube video, which accomplished nothing.

It accomplished.... Page views!

Really though, can we even call a very clear work-in-progress "broken"?

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Here's a thought. How about doing something useful about it and filing a bug report[1]? There are other boards with the same chipset as the one you tested (one of which I own), that actually work quite fine. We'd probably learn something useful about fermi in the process of fixing it, that'd actually benefit everyone..

Ben.

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I'm not even sure I understand why the open-source video drivers are so important to people, and why so much effort is spent on developing them. The proprietary drivers, though imperfect, are the far better option for almost all people (at least for nvidia, can't speak for all the others). There should really only be a tiny portion of users that use the open-source drivers, maybe for legal reasons or whatever.

There are so many other areas in the linux software domain that need to move forward; it seems like a waste to spend time on these open-source drivers.